Tyburn Tree: How London's Free Water Source Became a Hanging Carnival

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A traffic island near Marble Arch, marked by three young oak trees, was once the deadliest piece of ground in London. This episode traces Tyburn from its entry in the Domesday Book of 1086 as a rural estate of eight households, through the 1236 contract that piped its spring water free to the city at Cheapside, to its long career as England's main stage for public execution. The site sat where two Roman roads met, the routes now known as Edgware Road and Oxford Street, and the state wanted its warnings posted at the busiest crossroads it could find.

The story follows the Triple Tree raised in 1571, a triangular gallows built to hang many prisoners at once, and the three mile cart ride from Newgate Prison that could last three hours. Condemned prisoners dressed in their finest clothes and stopped for a last drink, while crowds bought gin and meat pies, paid for grandstand seats, and had their pockets picked beneath a dying thief. The disorder that made Tyburn famous finally ended it, and the episode asks whether the appetite for watching a public downfall ever went away.

• The first recorded Tyburn execution came in 1196, when the populist rebel William Fitz Osbert was dragged naked behind a horse and hanged beside the boundary stream.
• On June 23rd, 1649, 24 prisoners were hanged at the same moment, delivered in eight carts. With no trapdoor, the executioner simply whipped the horse and death came by slow strangulation.
• Crowds brawled with surgeons under the gallows to keep bodies from dissection, fearing a dismembered corpse could not rise on Judgment Day.
• An estimated 200,000 people watched the escape artist Jack Sheppard hang in 1724, and in January 1661 Oliver Cromwell's embalmed corpse was dug up from Westminster Abbey and hanged there.
• The fixed gallows came down in 1759, highwayman John Austin became the last to die at Tyburn on November 3rd, 1783, and by 1868 executions were hidden inside prison walls.